Saturday, November 26, 2016

I Miss the Old Days

On This Day in 1948, the First Polaroid Camera Was Sold: On November 26, 1948, Edwin Land debuted his first "Land Camera," dubbed the Model 95A. This was the first "Polaroid camera," as we'd popularly know it—though camera nerds like me still talk about Land Cameras. Anyway, the 95A went on sale at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston for $89.75. (That would be just over $900 in today's money.)

1 comment:

Don Coffin said...

And the images faded in just a couple of weeks.

True Polaroid story. The things sold like crazy of course, and Kodak tried to find a way into the market. Which wasn't all that hard, conceptually--buy some Polaroid film, and reverse-engineer it to see how it worked. Then find a *different way* to do the same thing. Which they did...except Land had patented many (I've seen numbers ranging from 7 to 12) ways of making self-developing pictures...Kodak (and other film companies) could never get to the Patent Office with something Land had not already patented.